فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

Background: In order to evaluate the growth rate of lung cancer, pulmonary nodule segmentation is an essential and crucial step. Segmentation of juxta-pleural pulmonary nodule in CT scans, especially small size ones, is still a challenge. Objectives: To better support the following radiomics analysis, this study aims to propose and develop a novel segmentation method for small-size juxta-pleural pulmonary nodules. Results: To validate the performance of the proposed segmentation approach, we selected 50 juxta-pleural nodules with diameter ranges from 5 mm to 10 mm from Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) database. Compared with the ground truth generated by radiologists, we achieved an average overlap rate of 76.93% ± 0.06 with a false positive rate of 13.09% ± 0.09. Conclusion: After comparing and analyzing the segmentation results, we found that our approach outperformed the method reported in other literature. The experimental results demonstrated that our new method is an effective approach to segment small-size juxta-pleural pulmonary nodules accurately.